Bitmain released the Antminer firmware for S9-enabled AsicBoost

Company Bitmain, Chinese manufacturer mining equipment, has released a software update for its ASIC miners (Asimov) S9 Antminer support AsicBoost, which makes mining of bitcoin more efficient. This writes CoinDesk.

It is noteworthy that Bitmain just now opened AsicBoost users, although at the hardware level, this feature was implemented at the stage of chip production. The announcement says the technology will allow acicam Bitmain to hold the championship in bitcoin mining and will increase Hasrat network while reducing energy consumption.

The company explained that the previously planned to release support AsicBoost at the software level, because they feared that the technology can be protected by patents. However, lawyers Bitmain came to the conclusion that to date there is no specific patent on this software. In the announcement States:

We are happy to provide owners Asimov Antminer support this function, advantages AsicBoost without any negative impact on the bitcoin Protocol. This version of “open AsicBoost” uses a version of bits which is different from other manufacturers. It is transparent because you can see in the headers of the uprated units.

Next week Bitmain is planning to release a firmware with support for Antminer AsicBoost R4, S9i, S9j, T9 and T9+.

More recently AsicBoost was considered a controversial technology: the Core developers of Bitcoin said that bitcoin miners, which use the function of exploiting the vulnerability in the algorithm Proof-of-Work (it improves the efficiency of mining by 20%), conduct “foul play” and can harm the network.

It is also worth noting that Bitmain announced a few days after the statement Braiins startup plans to release their version with support for Antminer AsicBoost S9. Last Thursday, startup blog said that asik can support AsicBoost, although the independent evaluation, the technology reduces power consumption by 13%, not 20.

In his announcement Bitmain also reported that activated AsicBoost in mining pools BTC.com Antpool and in March of this year. Earlier it was suggested that Bitmain could use the technology in secret, although the company denied it.